A content-based load balancing algorithm with admission control for cluster web servers

  • Authors:

  • Saeed Sharifian;Seyed A. Motamedi;Mohammad K. Akbari

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Electrical Engineering, Amirkabir University of Technology, 15914, Tehran, Iran;Department of Electrical Engineering, Amirkabir University of Technology, 15914, Tehran, Iran;Department of Computer Engineering & IT, Amirkabir University of Technology, 15914, Tehran, Iran

  • Venue:
  • Future Generation Computer Systems
  • Year:
  • 2008

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

With the growing demands for web-based applications, cluster web servers emerged as a reliable and leading resource in internet infrastructure. Managing performance of the cluster web servers under heavy load conditions is a critical task specifically when it comes to the advent of dynamic contents and database-driven applications. In this paper we propose a new load balancing algorithm namely IQRD (Intelligent Queue-based Request Dispatcher) for web-switches of the cluster web servers which operates at layer-7. The IQRD aims to achieve better load balancing with the help of request classification, performance isolation and dynamic remaining capacity estimation mechanisms. For this, a queuing model was employed for each class of requests in each node of the cluster to provide an estimation regarding the node remaining capacity. This value is used as a load descriptor (index) in the load balancing algorithm and also used by the admission control mechanism. The implementation results with synthetic and realistic workloads confirm that IQRD effectively balances loads among servers in the cluster and achieves better response time and throughput compared to other load balancing algorithms. However, the IQRD algorithm offered more processing overheads both in the web-switch and the web servers, but presented a better load balancing among web servers, even when the request rates were beyond the cluster capacity.